In the Summer of 2004, I wrote the first of eight letters home from Jerusalem. I was eighteen years old, and spending a year at an Orthodox Jewish seminary in Jerusalem. It was a formative year and since then I’ve dreamed of going back to study more of the Jewish texts that have shaped both my heritage and my everyday life.

My eighteen-year-old letters home were filled with exclamation marks, rhetorical questions and words like “unwittingly”, “dazzling” and “delectably”. They’re a cheerful (if cringeworthy) memoir of my time there, which was a largely happy one. Maybe I’ll publish some of them here once I’ve reassured you that my writing style has matured.

Twelve years later, I’m off back to Jerusalem with my husband and our little boy. It’s a grown up gap year, and these blog posts are my grown up letters home.